Bioengineers found breakthrough in building smart cells, potential to detect autoimmune disease: Study

Rice University bioengineers have developed a new construction kit for building custom sense-and-respond circuits in human cells. The research, published in the journal Science, denotes a major breakthrough in the field of synthetic biology that could revolutionize therapies for complex conditions like autoimmune disease and cancer.

"Imagine tiny processors inside cells made of proteins that can 'decide' how to respond to specific signals like inflammation, tumour growth markers or blood sugar levels," said Xiaoyu Yang, a graduate student in the Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology PhD program at Rice who is the lead author on the study.

"This work brings us a whole lot closer to being able to build 'smart cells' that can detect signs of disease and immediately release customizable treatments in response."

The new approach to artificial cellular circuit design relies on phosphorylation. It is a natural process cells use to respond to their environment that features the addition of a phosphate group to a protein.

Phosphorylation is involved in a wide range of cellular functions, including the conversion of extracellular signals into intracellular responses -- e.g., moving, secreting a substance, reacting to a pathogen or expressing a gene.

In multicellular organisms, phosphorylation-based signalling often involves a multistage, cascading effect like falling dominoes.

Previous attempts at harnessing this mechanism for therapeutic purposes in human cells have focused on re-engineering native, existing signalling pathways.

However, the complexity of the pathways makes them difficult to work with, so applications have remained fairly limited.

Thanks to Rice researchers' new findings, however, phosphorylation-based innovations in "smart cell" engineering could see a significant uptick in the coming years. (ANI)